Archive for January 13th, 2009

Twitter guys closed their hole by requiring an additional basic HTTP authentication step to retrieve the friends timeline JSON feed. Well done, albeit still lacking as an anti-CSRF countermeasure, because if user already performed basic authentication for any reason during this session, the hack still works flawlessly (not sure about how likely this is, though).

Some readers complained about me slightly criticizing Adblock Plus' new 3rd party blocking, by calling it "rather inconvenient" (especially if compared with the new NoScript 1.8.8.95's anti-hijacking protection which doesn't require any script blocking), although I was actually praising the famous ad blocker as a countermeasure against this attack.
Yesterday evening, when I wrote that post, I was overly tired from a very stressful week, so I fell in the trap of suggesting to use Adblock Plus for a security purpose. After some sleep, a bit more in my mind, I recalled why I always recommend Adblock Plus as a wonderful annoyance blocker, but not to be relied upon for security: there are too many easy ways to circumvent it.
More in general, Adblock Plus and FlashBlock, despite a popular superstition, canâ€™t be considered security tools because theyâ€™re not conceived nor developed with the necessary defensive and proactive paranoid mindset.

I updated my PoC to reflect both these events.
Now it "hijacks" Twitter's public listings feed which, as the adjective "public" suggests, has no reason to be protected.
And this time Adblock Plus' 3rd party blocking won't help :)

Are you logged in Twitter?You need JavaScript to be enabled for this PoC to work

Some days ago my friend Gareth Heyes exposed an authorization bug in Twitter's JSON interface, by writing a short post titled I Know What Your Friends Did Last Summer. Do not click on his PoC with JavaScript enabled, unless you want to find yourself bombed by a lot of alert boxes showing some interesting Twitter data about you and your friends.

For your convenience, I've reproduced a less annoying PoC here:

Are you logged in Twitter?You need JavaScript to be enabled for this PoC to work

Notice/update: after some hours this article was out, Twitter secured its "friends timeline" feed. Therefore I updated this PoC to consume the "public" feed, still demonstrating the hijacking technique, albeit on a non-sensitive data set.

Twitter's JSON feed is spied upon using __defineSetter__, a useful JavaScript extension introduced by Mozilla and now implemented in all the modern browsers (i.e. all the popular ones except IE). After redefining a property setter on Object.prototype, we can read the values being set when the feed is loaded through a <SCRIPT> element:

The main problem here is, obviously, Twitter leaving this feed unsecured against cross-site requests, under the wrong assumption that it could be read only through XMLHttpRequest (which actually does not work cross-site). We can expect errors like this to be quite widespread, since so-called "AJAX security" is still in its infancy: consider that Twitter guys are not exactly newbies...

This JSON-hijacking technique won't work if any of the following conditions applies:

The feed provider (Twitter) secures its JSON to ensure 3rd party sites can't access it (i.e. implementing any anti-CSRF countermeasure).

The JSON payload is not enclosed in square brackets. If the JSON starts directly with curly braces, it gets intepreted as a code block, rather than an object initializer, and nothing happens.

You're using an antiquated browser (like IE).

JavaScript execution is disabled on the attacker's site (e.g. by using NoScript in its default configuration).

Yes, that's right: in the best NoScript tradition, while there's some ongoing work to prevent this kind of leakage from happening in next major version of Firefox, NoScript already provides a specific protection feature. Even better, this works even in Allow Scripts Globally mode, just like anti-XSS filters and the ClearClick anti-clickjacking technology, so you've got no excuse to stay unsafe.